Page 92 of Pin My Alpha
“This isn’t the same.”
“No. It’s not.” His mouth pulls sideways. “You’re worse.”
“Rude.”
“You’re welcome.”
I huff out a laugh before I can stop it. It dies fast.
Benji holds my gaze.
“Independence isn’t the same as being alone, Shay,” he says.
I look down at the soup.
“I told myself the walls were keeping the bad stuff out. They were just keeping me in.” His voice is low, all the sarcasm gone. “You already let him in. That’s why it hurts this much. You don’t get to un-know that.”
The room is still.
I can hear Jude talking too loud in the kitchen. Milo telling him to stop touching things. Soren saying something too soft to make out.
But in here, it’s just Benji and me and a napkin with a heart stabbed clean through.
“You don’t understand,” I say.
“I understand enough.”
“No, you don’t.” My voice gets sharp because it has to. Because if it doesn’t, it’ll break. “You didn’t grow up watching my mom become whatever some alpha needed her to be until he got bored. You didn’t watch her pack up her life because he said he had a better apartment, then come home crying because she didn’t know how to pay the electric bill without him.”
Benji doesn’t flinch.
I hate him for that.
“She’d always say it was different,” I keep going, the words spilling out before I can drag them back. “Every guy. Every time. He loves me, Shay. He sees me. He wants to help. And then suddenly she’s got nothing. Again. She’s standing in our kitchen trying to figure out who she is without some alpha telling her.”
My eyes burn. I blink hard, refusing.
“I can’t do that,” I say. “I can’t be her. I can’t be some college omega with a rich older alpha paying for everything while I play house upstairs.”
“Declan isn’t your mom’s exes.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.” The word comes out too fast. My hands are shaking around the bowl. “That’s why it’s worse.”
Benji goes quiet.
Because there it is.
Declan isn’t some guy who picked me up because I was available. He’s not temporary. He didn’t make me smaller. He listened when I had ideas. He gave me room behind that bar. He let me save something he loves and treated every spreadsheet like it mattered because I made it.
And when he got scared, he did what scared people do.
He reached for the thing he knew.
Money. Safety. A plan.
